Re: What's an annex? stratum?

Daniel Jacobowitz
2007-06-23T21:23:46Z

On Sat, Jun 23, 2007 at 01:51:50PM -0700, Michael Eager wrote:
> The doc refers to a non-existent DTD file which is supposed to
> describe the XML target description annex. I assumed it was obsolete.

You are looking at mismatched source and manual, I assume - you didn't
say what versions you were using. In the HEAD version and snapshots,
gdb/features/gdb-target.dtd does exist and the documentation describes
it. The most accessible copy of the online docs refers to HEAD; I
wonder if we should make the manual for the last release more
prominent instead.

> It's not clear whether this is the same annex referenced in target.c.

Annexes are auxilliary data passed to target_xfer_partial:
/* Request that OPS transfer up to LEN 8-bit bytes of the target's
OBJECT. The OFFSET, for a seekable object, specifies the
starting point. The ANNEX can be used to provide additional
data-specific information to the target.

For the remote protocol, this usually means qXfer packets, like so:

`qXfer:OBJECT:read:ANNEX:OFFSET,LENGTH'
Read uninterpreted bytes from the target's special data area
identified by the keyword OBJECT. Request LENGTH bytes starting
at OFFSET bytes into the data. The content and encoding of ANNEX
is specific to the object; it can supply additional details about
what data to access.

--
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery